> "From a global allocation perspective, actually, it's quite terrible to have everybody have a bunch of the world's limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer, and being used maybe 5% of the time"
I don't actually have a massive problem with his logic here ... if he was to put the blame on Windows or Google treating RAM like it's a cheap commodity.
Also, if gamers weren't overbuying RAM this whole time, realistically the small set of manufacturers would have consolidated even further through the 2010s.
> Special assistance like emergency lending or direct capital infusions to prop up insolvent A.I. companies’ operations or prevent their orderly resolutions through ordinary bankruptcy processes
I appreciate the signal to the lending industry to cool the brakes on this stuff, and that the they are specifically targeting golden parachutes. But legislation like this is at best largely performative.
If the economy ends up crashing because the bubble popped, and legislators can't intervene to prevent a knock-on collapse, they are going to be out of their jobs anyway.
This is crazy to me. The amount of great games under $20 that you can get these days is overwhelming. (But it helps that Roguelikes are my favorite genre - Have recently been playing Diceomancer, Combolands,Plan B, Emberwards,Iron Nest, Against the Storm, to name just a few)
Part of getting older is naturally being less interested in new things - be it movies or music. If you find yourself scrolling through Steam not finding anything you like, it could just be a feeling of fulfillment with what you already like?
Someone who makes this statement this really want us to equate it with racist chattel slavery - the most heinous form of worker exploitation in modern memory. "Oh, I just meant: {the most common type of work in human history}" as a retreat is not very compelling.
I don’t think that’s true, words just tend to diminish in strength over time towards a muddy middle. Look at how basically anything gets labeled “fascist” these days.
For an older example consider “awesome” (literally: inspiring awe)
It was Carlyle who, in his seminal Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question, argued that slavery is a fundamental human relationship, and as such you can't ban slavery, but can only ban the word.
Whether it was through serfdom, indentured servitute, state labor obligations, patriarchal labor obligations, or outright slavery - coerced human labor was a constant norm.
In Britain, quitting a job was criminal until 1875!
The idea that work is done almost exclusively through voluntary labor is a modern (post-WW2) reality, and even then mostly exclusive to Western, capitalist nations. Even in modern, non-capitalist society (Soviet Union, Maoist China) work was largely obligatory and assigned to you.
Of course, Marx would point out that all labor is obligatory if you need to work to eat. But I think he would even take for granted the ability for everyone to accept or reject what specific work they wanted to do.
The distinction (besides Anthropic being too big to be thrown in jail) is that Aaron Schwartz was intentionally pirating research papers with intent to redistribute, and was publicly attacking copyright laws.
Anthropic training their model outside of public sight without intent to redistribute, and had a large paper trail that expressed they believed they were acting within fair use.
Are you saying Aaron Swartz should have just left a similar paper trail documenting that he believed to do the right thing in the interest of society? I don't believe this would have saved him from the wrath of the copyright industry.
Here's my understanding, someone correct me if I'm wrong:
- Anthropic et al basically grabbed whatever content they could to scan and train the model.
- The vast majority of what they scanned were books they bought at wholesale in big lots. Stuff being weeded out from Goodwills or libraries and (mostly) bound for destruction anyway.
- They didn't copy the texts per-se, they studied the relationships between words to build a statistical/predictive model of natural language.
- Whether this a fair or illegal use of copyrighted text already seems like an adorably obsolete question. Regardless, the damage is basically done - they can neither prove one way or another how much any single text influenced their model and they cannot unscramble the egg without starting over.
- Rather than get stuck in court for decades splitting the hairs about copyright law, they wrote massive checks to the publishing industry and agreed to a bunch of restrictions around copyrights.
- For the foreseeable future, every independent copyright holder now has grounds to take grievances to Anthropic and get some form of compensation.
The last court case, mentioned in the article, found Anthropic guilty of pirating eBooks. That's where the penalty came from.
The court ruled that it was fair to train on books, but they had to acquire them legally. That's why these companies buy physical books and scan them now.
The Stanford professors in this article opted out of that last case and are trying to get higher payouts.
> they cannot unscramble the egg without starting over
I would bet they do have copies on their hard-drives (which would probably be legal for them to possess for their own use, if the originals were obtained legally), and that they could simply omit them from their next training run that they probably do at major updates anyway.
The vast majority of what they scanned were books they bought at wholesale in big lots. Stuff being weeded out from Goodwills or libraries and (mostly) bound for destruction anyway.
No, the lawsuit was because they illegally acquired the books (e.g. downloading them from piracy websites)
These days they are sticking to more legal means like the one you described
Nope. The $1.5 billion settlement had nothing to do with whether LLM training is fair use.
It was how they got the books for training: they torrented collections of pirated ebooks. There are Slack messages from executives describing the process as "blatant violation of copyright." They were stealing books and they knew it.
They didn't start buying books legally and scanning them until much later.
> They didn't copy the texts per-se, they studied the relationships between words to build a statistical/predictive model of natural language.
I understand exactly what you mean by this, and you are wrong. If they did not copy them, it would not be possible to extricate copyrighted works out of the model like Harry Potter. You can argue against the copyright system, but don't pretend that what they've done is essentially an advanced form of copying. The data is in the weights.
The article points out the primary source is recycling operations.
This is not some big currency or export program. It's most likely Grandma and Grandpa hawking their jewelry.
The cash for gold industry in the US is absolutely massive and growing. Most of it is fueled by boomers dumping their assets into gold and silver - and then cashing it out when times get worse.
There is a reason Pimps, Dealers bought gold chains versus kept cash. Cash and bank accounts could seized while what your arrested with, such as jewelry, is given back to you upon release.
Need cash on hand, pawn it or use it as collateral for a loan.
It is away around the legal system to retain wealth.
> It is away around the legal system to retain wealth.
Yes, absolutely, and it goes back farther than criminals. Why do you think everyone's grandma has a jewelry collection, while less of the youth do? Because before the 70s, women were not allowed to have their own bank accounts. Their gold and jewelry was the only type of wealth they could keep for themselves.
You've just described a large part of why Jews are so prominent in gem and jewelry trade. If a family's real estate and capital wealth are seized by Christian rulers, jewels and precious metals are the best value-by-weight to sneak a portion of it out during a pogrom.
The other reason is the Christian historically yes-and-no relationship with usury (banking).
Why couldn't jewelry or other items you are arrested with be seized as well if they can prove (or rather, if you can't disprove) they were bought with ill-gotten gains?
When the USA used to be a law-abiding country, they generally respected people’s personal belongings. It’s hard to prove whether that piece of gold jewelry is not a family heirloom.
What's really striking is the current administration performed one of the most brutal cost cutting programs in recent memory. And despite the massive amount of disruption caused (and to be caused) there is almost nothing to show for it financially. Just pennies in the ashtray of a Lamborghini.
Obviously the people behind it were not serious, and did nothing to actually address government waste or reform the welfare system. But the result is the same - the idea of cost cutting as a means of addressing the deficit is effectively dead. There is no dry powder on the "slash budgets" side of the ledger. All that's left is raising taxes. (Or do nothing until there's an actual hyperinflation event).
We won't solve the problem by raising taxes. Let me be clear that I agree that raising taxes should be part of the solution, I just don't think the people will vote for that. People will at most take a token increase on the "rich" that will bring in a lot less money than planned because they will find a way to dodge it.
Most likely, the bulk of the solution will come through debasement and stealth default. Real inflation plus manipulating the official inflation numbers to default on a part of inflation adjusted obligations like TIPS and social security.
The problem is that taxes are never actually raised "fairly" or even at least proportionally. And the higher taxes rise, the faster the social split accelerates, with fewer and fewer (relatively) people paying first 40%, then 45%m then 50%, all the while watching their richer neighbors tax evading first at 30%, then 25%, then 8% then 1% then whatever comes after. I assure you, nothing motivates voting for literal Lucifer if he promises to reduces taxes even a tiny bit from the levels already reaching 50%+. I'm at the bottom quartile per my position and I pay 40% annually, my richer peers from top quartile pay something which would amount to around 22-24% annually from a higher gross too. Same country, same industry, same bands/grades. M for Motivation. I personally wouldn't vote for Lucifer at next election, but only because I do realize that he would simply lie about everything. But I do understand everyone from middle class who would believe sweet lies.
And while the notes above are my observations and thoughts, they are not something outlandish or wrong. Sociologists have also noticed this effect, it even has its own name and studies:
Last I looked, the tax rates required weren’t insanely high if you accepted fixing it over a hundred years or so.
I suspect you’re right though. My fear is that systemic failure will happen too quickly for a reaction to the initial worsening. I worry we’re nearing a precipice where our debt will be unaffordable if our credit gets downgraded a couple decades in the future.
They have no intention of raising taxes on the rich. In amongst all the DOGE "work" in the media, behind the scenes, Trump's administration delivered some of the biggest tax cuts for the rich the country has ever seen.
Trumps spent hours every day on the campaign trail rambling random ideas off the top of his head. He "telegraphed" everything from baby bonds, flying cars, free women's healthcare, "Freedom Cities", etc.
The reality is that he promised so many things to so many people that no matter what he does it can be spun to look calculated.
Regardless, from a realpolitik point of view, it's easier to remind people that are not getting what they wanted and were tricked, rather than try to convince them they were wrong this whole time.
And yet, it was clear from both his actions, his previous actions, people he have choosen and overall messages.
Fact is, people accused of "Trump derangement syndrome" actually predicted his rule. Very accurately. It was visible and clear. It is just that it feels better to pretend it was not clear.
And yet denied by the President, never heard of it, nothing to do with it etc. anyone who takes his word was convinced that dems were just being paranoid
On one hand agreed, on the other though I don't know if we can take this as especially important from a President that lies about literally everything. Not sure if him telling the truth about their plans would have actually changed anything.
You don’t make meaningful progress when you focus on a rounding error part of the budget. It’s like targeting private jet use for climate change. It’s for the feels so you can pretend you’re on the right side of things while doing absolutely nothing that matters in final effect even if 100% successful.
If you want to solve the budget deficit you need to go after the things that matter which is mandatory social spending these days. That and the revenue side combined are all that matter. Even the military is starting to become more and more irrelevant as social spending and debt service eats up all the air in the room. You could end it entirely tomorrow and you’d still have a deficit. It’s not the 1990s anymore.
Anything else can be immediately written off as unserious action brought by unserious people. The bike shedding of budgetary politics.
> It’s like targeting private jet use for climate change.
Bad example, because private jet use (and flying in general) is still relevant and shouldn't be ignored and it is easy to address with the overall solution which is carbon taxes.
> If you want to solve the budget deficit you need to go after the things that matter which is mandatory social spending these days
If we're talking about cutting waste, why not first cut the military budget which is larger than the next ten countries combined? The same military which can't stop a country whose GDP is smaller than it's budget?
But no, according to Republicans, the problem begins when you spend on people rather than showering money on corporations and billionaires.
Yes the current administration is generally responsible and yes they have caused a lot of problems. But can't we be clear this is primarily an Elon problem? No way of knowing but I would be surprised if in a timeline where Elon backed Harris and got her the win, DOGE would not have happened with similarly little impact.
I know many people in big tech that complain about the administration and drive a Tesla to work. People with plenty of wealth to change cars etc if willing. They enabled DOGE.
Government spending is not an Elon problem. The biggest components are entitlements like social security, medicare and military spending like the war in Iran. Most of the firings and departures were by the heads of those agencies not DOGE. Elon has caused many problems but this isn’t one of them.
There have been a lot of unnecessary expenses - war with Iran, trade wars with most places, especially Canada, boosting defence spending while alienating the allies and cuddling up to Putin and so on. You could reverse a lot of that.
You really want sane governance like under Bill Clinton which was the last time the budget balanced I think.
Huh? From what I heard, no combination of groups in the beltway bothered to expend the political capital to actually force through across the board cuts. Not even a meagre 5% cut per annum from the total budget.
They all backed out when it came to walk the talk.
(Or to cut $1 billion here and there, hundreds of times per annum, which would have needed like a dozen DOGEs and iron discipline in Congress)
> From what I heard, no combination of groups in the beltway bothered to expend the political capital to actually force through across the board cuts.
The administration successfully passed through some recisissions (the ones that gutted the entire USAID program, CPB, and etc) and passed the OBBBA. To say the "backed out" I think is a bit too generous. They essentially threw out anything that wasn't hard bolted down by the Constitution.
The reality is there is not any real way to achieve significant cuts without entitlement reforms or defense cuts (lol).
> most brutal cost cutting programs in recent memory
It's not really cost cutting, if the money is simply repurposed to be spent elsewhere. If you close agencies, gut others, but redirect all the money to grift to be pocketed by the ruling family, no cost has been cut.
The only reason software engineering existed is because coding and programming was unnecessarily hard. It was never meant to be an exclusive skill.
If you step back, the LLM revolution is just "computers now respond to human instruction, like they were always supposed to".
If you think of this field as a historic accident, and the current shift is a very unfortunate reset - it's a little less dystopian. In the long run, if it didn't affect me immediately, I don't mind a society that values "keeping restrooms clean" a little bit more and "talking to computers good" a little bit less.
I agree with you about not treating programming as a protected skill that has a right to be well paid, but computers were never “supposed” to be anything. They’re in no way inevitable in their current forms and any ideas about how they were supposed to be were just desires.
> The only reason software engineering existed is because coding and programming was unnecessarily hard. It was never meant to be an exclusive skill.
> ...
> If you think of this field as a historic accident, and the current shift is a very unfortunate reset - it's a little less dystopian.
No it's more dystopian. The "historical accident" was a little respite, where some workers could be comfortable and well off. They had a little market power to take the edge off their exploitation.
Now that market power is taken away, and they can enjoy the poverty they were always "meant" to have.
> In the long run, if it didn't affect me immediately, I don't mind a society that values "keeping restrooms clean" a little bit more and "talking to computers good" a little bit less.
Come on. Society isn't going to value "keeping restrooms clean." The people doing that will continue to be poorly paid and disrespected. It's just the opportunities to do something better will be taken away, so there will be more labor available for that kind of work.
One thing I've been thinking about is Baumol's Cost Disease. It's usually applied in at a macro scale across an economy: when a job somewhere becomes much more efficient, it makes all other jobs comparatively more expensive.
I've started to notice this on a micro scale as well. I am 20x more productive at coding and scripting, but I don't spend more of my time coding. My time is now filled with things like presentations, Jira, QA, etc. Ironically, despite all of the automation, the things that are painstaking and time consuming disproportionately require more time now.
I don't actually have a massive problem with his logic here ... if he was to put the blame on Windows or Google treating RAM like it's a cheap commodity.
Also, if gamers weren't overbuying RAM this whole time, realistically the small set of manufacturers would have consolidated even further through the 2010s.
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